Alacrify's New Site

17th April 2009

Alacrify's New Site

We're delighted to announce the arrival of our new website today. It is the culmination of many months of hard work and is entirely run off our own new Content Managment System - Alacrify Simple CMS.

We've finally got our site up to the standard that we like to offer our clients and bucked the trend that usually means that a plumber's plumbing usually needs fixing! This CMS is so simple to use that we've been able to add much more content to our site and hopefully make it a lot more interesting to our visitors and potential clients.

The site has a load of little gems in it, like friendly URLs which mean it's easier to read where you are in the site from the address bar of the browser; a powerful search facility that checks for matches across the whole website; a diary facility to post our events and courses on; several built in blog options; rss feeds; search engine optimisation; dynamic site maps and more.

We're now offering this CMS to our clients. If you'd like to know more about it or see if it suits your needs then do ring Jon on 01300 320076 or email jon@alacrify.co.uk

Preparing the Ground

One of the reasons for the delay in getting our own house in order has been fitting it in around clients' work. In traditional style we've burned the midnight oil on many occasions to get all the bits and pieces ready. There have been some interesting challenges and puzzles along the way that needed solving too, and because we wanted to make this a generic cms for other people to use too, it meant trying to think in several directions at once whenever we made a decision about how to do something to check it would be useful for other people too, and not just ourselves.

The principles behind our new CMS are grounded in simplicity. We wanted to make something that was sensible and easy to use; where the clever techy stuff was always in second place behind ease of use. We've deliberately avoided stuffing it full of clever, cutting edge widgets and 'toys' and tried to stay focussed on exactly the sorts of things that we and our clients want to use every day.

Mammoth Migration

Getting the new site live on our existing server took just over one hour, which for a root-and-branch change is a huge relief. We had to create a new database and file structure and upload all the supporting files needed to run the site. In the event there was only one significant snag on the way through which is now being sorted. Everything else fell into place nicely.

As part of the migration we have taken care to make sure that the old pages are properly redirected to the new ones. We don't want to lose any visitors because they're following a bookmarked or indexed link on another site to a page that is now completely different. Creating a .htaccess file has sorted this out for us very efficiently.

Getting Google On Board

The final piece of the new-launch has been to tell Google about it. We've uploaded a new dynamic site map telling Google about all the lovely new pages and content that can be found on our site. We're looking forward to seeing how it affects our statistics on Google Analytics.

If you've time to drop us a line we'd love to hear what you think about our new site. jon@alacrify.co.uk